Rainer Maria Rilke Illuminated Texts

This poem is one that reflects life itself. Life is full of first "Hellos" and last "Goodbyes." Yet the two edged sword is that sometimes letting go of our past is something to heavy to bear and it is sad to let go of the people and places we keep so close to our hearts. Yet, in the same turn when we leave the comfort of our lives to explore the unknown of the world we end up finding a new comfort with different people and far away places. This poem personifies the difficulties and trade-offs of moving on and being able to say your final "Goodbye."

In this illuminated text of Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Apple Orchard", we used carefully selected music, colors and motion to recreate Rilke's vision of an apple orchard. Some words were colored either red, green or yellow, the color of apples. The relaxing soundtrack meshes with the peaceful image Rilke creates in this poem, even the title of the song, "Natural", fits in with the poem. The last slide brings it all together when words are used to make a picture of an apple orchard.

We interpreted Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Again and again…” through this presentation of colored and moving text. We used a plain template of black and white and emphasized key words with color. The poem describes two lovers who fulfill the saying “together forever” by being buried next to each other in a graveyard “face to face with the sky”. ENJOY!

This is an Illuminated Text of Wislawa Szymborska's "The End and the Beginning". It highlights all the things the people who encountered and survived the war had to do in order to move on from the war. The clean up related tasks are the emphasis of the Illuminated Text in order to show the contrast between these people and those who have had no firsthand expirience with war and instead spend their time laying in the garss "with a cornstalk in his teeth". Also the sound effects emphasize it greatly. 

 This is an Illuminated Text based off of “Before Summer Rain” by Rainer Maria Rilke. In the poem, the persona looks back on life and finally realizes just how much time has passed them by. The persona then becomes nostalgic about the days that they once had, which are now the days that they can never get back. We chose this poem because we believed that it conveyed a powerful message, and was rich in imagery.

We chose this poem because its theme was one of the many we had talked about(the past, remebering it, and to move foward) and was very descriptive. So in our illuminated text, we tried to show the connections between the life or descriptions of the apple orchard to our lives. For instance, the bearing of the fruit echoing old memories(later on). Also, to go with this theme we picked a song to match up with the "remember the good old times" theme.

We chose this text because of it’s connect ability to all the different works of literature we’ve read so far in this class. It could connect to “Young Goodman Brown”, “The Allegory of the Cave”, “The History of Love”, and most recently “Candide”.

We hope to show the recurring theme we found in the text. Its theme is of something, we don’t know what, disappearing all of a sudden and the emptiness that lingers afterwards. We hope to show this by underlining key words that express those kinds of sentiments.